PS 3511 
.E73 P6 
1909 
Copy 1 



K 



YALE UNIVERSITY PRIZE POEM 

1909 




HHm&tON 



YALE UNIVERSITY PRIZE POEM 

1909 



THE ANCIENT MANUSCRIPT 



WALTER L. FERRIS 



NEW HAVEN 

The Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Company 
1909 



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PREFATORY NOTE 

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This poem received the twelfth award of the prize 

offered by Albert Stanburrough Cook to Yale University 
for the best unpublished verse, the Committee of 
Award being Professors George H. Nettleton, Stockton 
Axson, and Edward S. Parsons. 



THE ANCIENT MANUSCRIPT 



I keep strange company to-night, because 

My heart is deep in question. These old saints 

Are somewhat cold of cheer, for all their words 

Are fire. This ancient must have traced his lines 

With a live coal for pencil, while the pain 

Bit to the ver}^ marrow of his soul, 

And wrought this agony of speech. Each page 

Is like a bed of little dancing flames, 

That leap and dart and weave their fantasy 

Of changing light and shadow. And their breath 

Is like a restless flaming wind that beats 

And sways the slender house wherein I dwell. 

Buttressed and girded with what pain of thought! 

Strange fire ! It is no wonder the old Greek, 
Musing on heaven and earth and substances, 
Saw in it God's last secret ; no, nor strange 
That air-born fancy saw a kindly god 
Winging his way from heaven's steep citadel 
To place his flaming reed within the hands 
That groped along their cheerless way ; nor strange 
That Jove's deep wrath should light upon him, stern, 
Immortal, at that great revealing gift. 



For light is born of flame, and the swift gleams 

Pierced through the shrouding darkness and made plain, 

Increasingly, earth's daylight mysteries. 

And with the stealing, grateful warmth that crept 

From hand to heart, and heart to brain, there grew 

A thrilling sense of life. First, trees and rocks, 

The clouds, the winds, through the baptismal fire, 

Engendered souls in the new thought of man. 

But now cold fear, the shadow of the flame. 

Followed with stealthy tread. For wilful winds, 

And seas that strike with calculated blow, 

Become thrice dangerous. Then, as the light grew, 

These lesser beings merged into one God 

Whose heart was flame — perhaps Jove's ancient wrath 

At the god's kindly gift, become eternal. 

Now lighting upon man. So the flame spread 

Before men's starting eyes until it grew 

The half of heaven — a mighty flaming hell. 

Wherein God's anger 'gainst the soul of man 

Finds its most sacred vengeance ; and the cry 

Of stricken hearts that rose continually 

Was, 'Save my soul ; O God of fire, my soul !' 

And then, because all men above the brute 

Would save their neighbors from a burning house, 

Or equal fate, if done at small expense, 

Man cried out to his fellow, 'Save thy soul, 



Oh, save thy soul from hell !' And if some one, 
Who chanced to think a little by himself. 
Suggested that the fear was overdone, 
And love was somewhat, he was seized upon, 
And straightway shown, with proof satirical, 
The force of fire. Well, it sounds barbarous ; 
Yet he was sure to burn in the same way 
For some few million years, and a half hour. 
Or minutes more or less, added to these. 
Would not mean much to him, but would indeed 
Be proof to God that those who set the flame 
Were worthy heaven, and prove a wholesome sight 
To any who might chance to think. And then. 
It would anticipate heaven's best delight 
When those in bliss should see, across the chasm. 
The writhings of the lost. 

The proof I find, 
In all this dreary waste where Fear is law, 
Is this : Force lives in fire ! — witness these words 
That burn upon this page. And the next day 
After such writing he would stand and preach, 
This ancient, to a crowd of wide-eyed folk, 
And, being saint and poet too, would see 
Before him, not a crowd, but seas of flame 
Where wallowed writhing souls. And then, as though 
His flesh felt the hot breath of flaming wrath. 



He screamed his warning to those breathless ones 
Who yet might save their souls. It is not strange 
He drove them all within his fold — if that 
Could mean salvation, which, conveniently, 
It did to him. 

But now my question is, 
Where has the fire gone ? Perhaps the god 
Repented his rash venture, and has stolen 
Jove's secret back again. For, since the time 
This monk was writing, men have used the gift 
To make dissecting knives, and drills to probe 
The earth's dark places, and great telescopes 
To dare heaven's very gates, and find out hell, 
And laugh in its despite, as being born 
In madmen's brains, too credulous and fearful. 
Or has the fire been sucked up from the deep, 
To roar through furnace-blasts, and forge the bands 
That wrap the earth in harnesses of steel, 
And bind the Pleiades? Howe'er it be, 
The shadow, Fear, is gone, and the fierce flame 
Has lost its sting. For men are busied so 
With finding how God works, there is no time 
To fear. And if a shadow should be found. 
A thousand eyes would probe it. and gray heads 
Would buzz about its substance, its relation. 
And what great Kant would find its place to be 



In the mind's structure, and what not, until 
The cumulative Hght would prove so keen 
That the poor frightened shadow must needs flee 
To the lee side o' the moon, where it might live 
Its unobtrusive life. 

Yet some faith lives, 
Though drained of elemental force. I, too, 
Believe in God, and in a glorious life 
That surely, through vast love and will and thought, 
Shall rise to Him. But yet to save my soul 
Does not seem needful — rather find my soul, 
Through joyous searching, not through palling fear, 
And most among my fellows where God is. 
And this because mankind is some way more 
Than man; and man to find himself must link 
His will and thought and purpose with mankind's, 
All finding God t6gether through the best 
That lives in each and lives in all, and thus 
Uplifting a strong ladder to high God, 
Whereon all men may climb. This worthy saint, 
When he set out to share his truth with men. 
Wrote it in blood, and screamed it from the altar, 
And cried so potently that men flocked there. 
And when I stand and speak and look upon 
The sea of faces, my heart shrinks with pain 
At deadly earthliness and stolid sin ; 



But yet to lift them up I cannot rave 

And curse, and call heU's fire upon them. Hell 

Is vanquished, and the soul is given wings, 

And the broad realm of universal light 

Is her dominion. She's no longer chained 

To one or other, hell's deep sea of wrath 

Or heavenly streets of gold. And when my soul 

Goes venturing through the light, and tries to speak 

Some messages of beauty, my words fall 

Like quiet drops of rain upon a pool 

Hid in the forest, while in the world without, 

In sea and land and sky, a thundering sound 

Goes up from the storm-riven earth to God, 

Drowning all fainter voices. 

Thus it is, 
The mind that ventures wide gets lost in wonder. 
And when it stays sedately down it finds 
So much of truth in everything, the lines 
That sunder right and wrong, the good and best, 
So faint, that while it views this side and that 
The fire is waning. And the harsh racking world 
Thunders so mightily, there needs a voice 
Speaking a truth so certain and so loud 
That men must hear, and leave the pleasant paths 
That lead — to what? — this preacher says to hell. 
And I must say, at worst, to loss of being. 



At best, a lagging back in the great train 
That marches very surely on to God. 

And yet this question goads me. Is the force, 
The fire, convicting power, essential truth ? 
Or is it sealed in the deep heart of God 
That less of certainty, and more of search 
And groping, more of beauty, more of light 
That chases shadows from the universe, 
Is higher truth ? And is it destiny 
That gradually the general heart of man, 
Winnowed and purged thus in its wandering, 
Shall win, by way of deeper insight, truth 
That hides in beauty, shining, vanishing, 
Yet always luring by gleams spiritual, 
Until we find out God by being drawn 
Resistlessly to Him through a great love? 

Oh, who shall tell the answer ? This good man 
Almost convicts me by his thunderous speech 
Of cowardice, or lack of strength or sight, 
Or undue selfishness of search, the while 
Some one beneath my window, drunk or cold, 
Needs present love, or warning words, or both. 
And yet between my hour and his there yawns 
A mighty chasm of thought, and I, like him, 
Am one with my own age. God grant to us 
That we are nearer Him by all this march ! 



How the hours pass ! This little candle-gleam 
Will soon flare out, drowned in a pool of wax — 
And then, what of the flame ? Will the light flit 
To some great realm of sun beyond the dark? 
What if my flame of life, at some deep hour 
Before the stirring dawn, should be snuffed out 
In a great pool of silence? Shall I then 
Be merged once more in the vast whole of being, 
And win, by timeless moving on and on. 
The unutterable secret — not alone 
In a great musing silence, set apart. 
But as the mighty whole is interfused 
With stealing sounds of newer mysteries ; 
As though deep organ-tones should fill the sky, 
First thunderous pedal-notes, then harmonies, 
Innumerable voices, mystic, sweet. 
Triumphant, swelling with diviner passion, 
Flooding the sky with melody that seeks 
Each space and cranny of the universe. 
And fills the void of heaven ? And were I there, 
How quickly would my sense respond, and feel 
The meanings that are said ? And how, O God, 
Should my soul know my soul in that vast sea? 

Ah, there the veil is drawn. But this I know — 
There is no fear in me, sweet night, no fear ! 



MAY 22 1912 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

015 898 134 8 



